It was a surprise to find myself walking amidst cicada and cricket choirs in the thick, hot, wet, Southern air in late August.
Just a week earlier I had been sitting cross-legged in a gompa in the Okanogan Highlands, gleaning wisdom from a Buddhist monk during a regular Thursday evening class.
But the grandmother who the Buddhist group promised to recite prayers for did end up passing that very evening, her soul guided and protected by Orthodox Christian prayers and by Tibetan Buddhist prayers (there is benefit in having a Perennial-minded granddaughter!).
My Ma has moved on from this world, she being one-half of the pair who raised me a great deal in my early years. It was in an old white farmhouse in south central Kentucky, with a "haunted forest" in the distance, a dairy farm behind (where we worked), and an old oak shade tree beside the house that provided shade from the sun as we shucked corn for hours on end in those hot golden summer days that seem so very long ago.
It was up at 5AM each morning to walk hand in hand up the gravel path to the barn, where we'd spend the next several hours bottle feeding calves. Now I know the sadness that is a conventional dairy farm, but back then I didn't.
Later, we'd make lunch and I'd ride a bicycle around in circles "delivering newspapers" which were just rocks. And Ma would exclaim just as excitedly with each new toss as she did with the first.
Then, maybe we would go inside and make sugar cookies with "Funkytown" or "Seasons in the Sun" playing on my little baby blue Mickey Mouse record player.
I'd play in large piles of cottonseed and we'd work in the garden, no doubt inhaling all of the little particulates that lead to her lung scarring.
Ma always wanted to change up things, so once a month we'd end up repainting a room--usually the kitchen--and I remember how big I felt when she let me paint the garage on my own (I was only about 5 years old). Whether it just came naturally or if it was instilled by her during those formative years, I've never been able to sit idle.
In the late afternoons, Pa would get home from milking cows all day and ride me around the house on all fours, me the little toehead jockey. He'd tell me to watch my little knee when we stormed past the hot iron woodstove. Then, sometimes he'd let me drive his big old green Chevy Silverado truck around the farm, him manning the pedals while I steered-- I still attribute this to the main reason for my spotless driving record.
In the evenings, we'd eat simple dinners like a bowl of buttermilk with cornbread, then me and Ma would wrestle on the living room floor while Pa, in his recliner, would slap his leg laughing at us. On cold nights, Ma and I would get into bed and, facing one another, giggle-shiver until we both warmed up.
As I grew up, I moved to many different places, but we never lost touch. This Thursday was the first time my planner didn't have "call ma" as one of the list items. A few years ago, it went from "call ma and pa" every week, to "call ma", and now to empty space.
Pa and I were just as close, but he passed three years ago. They both lived to be 87 years old, both just shy of 88 by one month, and when I think back on their life, it's amazing that stress didn't take them sooner.
Ma and Pa lost their two wonderful sons, Frankie and Jerry, when they were only 15 and 16 years old. Both boys were on their way to church in an old Corvair when they went off the road over a bridge. No one knows why it happened. So it broke Ma and Pa for a long, long time. They still had three daughters to care for, my mother being the youngest, but the years to come were very dark and difficult for them, my mother included who was only 7 years old when she lost her two superhero brothers. Her little kid portraits go from huge smiles and pure joy to depression and complacency and it breaks my heart to this day. The way that tragedy echoed down and imprinted on our family line can't be overstated. It is in my DNA even now in myriad ways, though I never knew my uncles.
But something else that is surely in my DNA is this: I was told at Ma's funeral last month by an older cousin a story I had never heard before. He said that his dad and another man were the first to arrive on the scene of Frankie and Jerry's wreck that Sunday morning and that they worked hard to try to pry the car off of them, which had been crinkled and smooshed into the size of "that piano right there" (recall we were standing in the funeral home as he told me this). The men had been using pry bars and were just about to go get a tractor when Ma arrived on the scene, ran down from her car, and using only her bare hands, managed to bend and lift the car as to release the boys from it. She then cradled Frankie's head in her hands, who had already died, and Jerry was taken to the hospital, where he died that night. Knowing Ma, I know this story is real. She was truly a force. My cousin told me that everyone around town talked about her doing that for months after it happened, but not once did Ma ever tell me this story, and she talked sometimes about Frankie and Jerry and that period of life.
And though I've cried for the loss of Ma and Pa both now, which feels like a lost era, and my heart breaks most for the loss of that generation- those authentic salt of the earth people, what I feel more than anything since Ma's passing is that large force, that big energy she had until her last days, I feel a strange void there now. My experience of death of loved ones so far is that it's a strangeness more than anything.
I felt Ma nearby hours before she passed. I felt her in the passenger seat beside me as I drove through the Okanogan Highlands that afternoon to Thursday night class. It was so real that I looked over once, and smiled "at her" and said out loud, "You finally get to see where I live!"
Then, after she passed, I felt her still close, and so I prayed many times a day for her soul to pass on, unattached to here, with peaceful and protected passage. Now, she seems very far away. And with her, so many memories-- the flickers of youth, sun-warmed, gritty, real, and so full of laughter and love.
In loving memory of Anna Katherine Honeycutt, Eugene Honeycutt, and Frankie and Jerry Honeycutt.
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| Me and ma, circa 1989 |
